Software Engineer, Distributed Data Systems

Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine unlike the world has ever seen. We build massive-scale infra to crawl the entire web train state-of-the-art embedding models to process it and design super high performant vector databases to retrieve over it. We now power search for Cursor Cognition HubSpot and over 400000 developers and have raised $350m from Lightspeed Benchmark and a16z.

Our ultimate goal is to build perfect search over all the worlds information far beyond Google. If you want to build massive-scale ML systems that will define the way the new AI world consumes information this is the place for you.

As a Data Engineer youll architect and build the data infrastructure that powers everything we dofrom crawling billions of pages to training our embedding models to serving real-time search. Youll have enormous autonomy in designing systems that scale to hundreds of petabytes. If youve ever wanted to build data pipelines at a scale that most companies only dream about this is your chance.

Who You Are

• Deep understanding of lakehouse architectures (Delta Lake Iceberg Hudi) and when to use them

• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed data processing pipelines

• Hands-on experience with streaming data systems (Kafka Flink or similar)

• Familiarity with Ray Spark or ClickHouse at production scale

• An obsessive focus on reliability and building systems that dont page you at 3am

Bonus

• Experience with Lance or other vector-native storage formats

• Background in GPU-accelerated data processing (RAPIDS cuDF)

What You Could Do

• Design a lakehouse architecture that handles 100 PB of web crawl data

• Build streaming pipelines that process billions of documents per day for real-time indexing

• Architect the data layer for our embedding training infrastructure on Ray

• Scale our ClickHouse deployment to handle analytical queries across petabytes of search logs

Logistics

• Location: This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco.

• Visas: Were happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g. STEM OPT OPT H1B O1 E3). While we cannot guarantee your visa we have historically been successful in sponsoring candidates from all over the world. If you receive an offer our team will work hard to get you a visa.

• Benefits: We offer premium healthcare benefits (medical dental vision) fertility benefits 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all new parents and a monthly wellness stipend to all of our employees.

Required Experience:

IC